Category Archives: Nihilism

PARIS IN THE EARLY 1980s: 68 is in the rear-view and the soixante-huitards are running the show. Mitterrand is president; the welfare state is being expanded. Meanwhile, Frances former colonial subjects are existing in a state of perpetual subalternity, destined to prepare the takeout food and deliver the drugs of their white counterparts.

This is the reality that the memorable unnamed narrator of The Sympathizer steps into at the start of Viet Thanh Nguyens new novel. A refugee several times over, hes fleeing both Vietnam, where he was brutally tortured by his own allies in a reeducation camp, and the United States, which has rejected him in its own fashion. With The Committed, the captain now sets his sights on the contradictions of another colonial empire. If you thought the US was a warmongering, racist hypocrite of epic proportions, just wait until you hear about France!

Nguyen is a perceptive, scathing, and genuinely funny writer, qualities which suffused The Sympathizer and are somewhat more unevenly on display here. Other artists (Marie NDiaye, Michael Haneke, Kamel Daoud) who have explored the long and brutal legacy of the French Empire have done it more subtly and to more devastating effect. In comparison, the captains observations as he arrives to his new place of refuge feel, well, American: obvious and somewhat oversimplified. There are near-constant comparisons between the two countries ways of doing colonialism. I felt a little like I was reading Adam Gopnik if hed been sent to a reeducation camp and forced to mainline Fanon.

What these observations are not, though, is sanitized or sentimental. There are no rose-colored glasses to be found here: the captains Paris is the Paris of pervasive dog shit, filthy bistros, pigeons, drunks, casual police brutality, and the priphrie. Forced to clean toilets at the worst Asian restaurant in Paris, he takes to selling drugs, disguising himself as a Japanese tourist to bypass suspicion as he goes to visit his clients. It works on the street, the cops look right past him, their attentions focused on Black and Arab immigrants instead. Nguyen accurately and convincingly depicts a city that both leans on and marginalizes its immigrant and refugee populations. He also illustrates what the contours of that city might feel like to someone who is unwanted in the uncanny way that Parisians make any outsider feel unwanted, but also unwanted because he is Vietnamese, a refugee, a boat person, as one of the supposedly liberal friends of his aunt reminds him.

Over the course of the novel, the narrators already divided consciousness splinters further. Here more commonly referred to as Crazy Bastard, hes haunted by visions of people more ideologically committed than he: the two men he killed in Los Angeles; Bon, still living, who hates communists with such a fervor that he will not hesitate to kill his own best friend; and the communist agent who was gang-raped as he watched and did nothing to stop it, in what remains the most nauseating depiction of sexual violence that I have read. Wracked by guilt, our narrator tries to atone for these sins by doing things like reading Julia Kristeva, performing cunnilingus, and saving the life of a rival drug dealer, which mostly feel like embarrassingly insufficient acts of restitution. But he is also cracking up, the controlled interplay between his two selves that Nguyen explored in The Sympathizer collapsing and dissolving.

The insistence on cycling between pronouns to depict this disintegration often feels more like a gimmick than a convincing literary device. Still, Crazy Bastard remains a fascinating narrator: mordant, impotent but lascivious, filled with shame and rancor, attuned to absurdity, and prone to long bouts of philosophical rumination. He spends much of this novel in pursuit of oblivion, which he courts via dope, cognac, the cheeky use of an alias, V Danh, which means anonymous in Vietnamese, the mindless comforts of a high-class sanatorium, and an extended torture session that nearly delivers him. Though The Sympathizer planted the seeds for this nihilism, that novel ended on a surprising note of hope. The death drive has clearly won out here. The novels epigraph is Nothings more real than nothing, a line from the Franco-Cambodian filmmaker and Killing Fields survivor Rithy Panh, and repetitions on that theme abound.

Then there are the supporting players: a lawyer who defends war criminals and sleeps with the narrators aunt, to his confusion and titillation; a Senegalese bouncer obsessed with Aim Csaire; a troupe of diminutive and fiendishly scatological sidekicks called the seven dwarves; a bourgeois socialist politician, and someone described simply as the Maoist PhD. I cant quite make up my mind about these characters. No matter how richly drawn, most of them remain types, designed to say things about power, war, race, gender, and colonialism, or merely to provide comic relief. As the novel progresses, the socialist politician reveals himself to be a virulent racist rather than the initially assumed run-of-the-mill paternalist; otherwise, there is little in the way of meaningful character development.

But Nguyen is also articulating a perverse truth here about the corrosive effect of nation-states, political ideology, and imperialism on the individual. In a world where colonial empires have manufactured and enshrined racial difference, people are never really just people. At one point, the narrator tries to give a lecture to a pair of Algerian drug dealers about banding together to fight against their common colonial overlord and ends up barely escaping with his life. Im sorry I dont know any racial slurs for you, Crazy Bastard politely tells one of them later.

Nguyen is a maximalist par excellence, and the furious pace of this novel rarely lets up. The Committed includes one seven-page sentence that begins with the narrator getting beaten up in a park and ends with him trying heroin, and a scene in which a Corsican business associate of his waxes philosophic while cycling through various positions of the Kama Sutra. We move from torture session to brothel and back again. The narrator is often sobbing. There is an orgy involving cartoonishly racist costumes (a funny riff on the libidinal power of race) and a truly disgusting series of interludes revolving around a clogged toilet. Nguyen relishes in articulating the essential scumminess of humans of all stripes, and he has a particular knack for revealing just how pathetic and vile our supposed masters of the universe are. No stone revealing human filth is left unturned.

There is almost no respite from this, and thus almost no room for the reader to feel the full weight of the horror that underlies this world one where ideological allegiances cleave the oldest and dearest of friendships, and the children of colonized nations fight to the death for a drug route while their actual oppressors stay comfortably high, shielded from the violence their indulgences have produced. That may be the real nihilistic point that this novel is making: that centuries of colonial pillage and subjugation have created a world in which solidarity does not and cannot exist. Im not sure if I agree, but the point hits home regardless.

The moments of pause, when they do come, testify powerfully to this reverberating violence, and to Nguyens considerable skills as a novelist. I was struck by a scene where the narrator wakes up at a brothel to encounter Madeleine, the Cambodian sex worker assigned him, distraught over a newspaper headline exposing mass graves in her home country. He is surprised to find that she blames him for the news, or at least what he represents: Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1978 and occupied the country for a decade, though the Vietnamese are not responsible for this particular atrocity.

The night before, Madeleine was all artifice, perfectly playing the role of doting, hyperfeminine mistress. Now, in the cold light of morning, she is revealed: alone and far from home, surviving on what she can, and every bit as haunted as the narrator. He tells her goodbye, but shes closed her eyes against him. Coffee and a hashish cigarette serve as Madeleines madeleine, transporting her back into a past that will never exist again. [S]he was undoubtedly watching a movie only she could see, the narrator thinks, the rickety reel of memories in which everyone she knew was still alive.

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Where Solidarity Cannot Exist: On Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Committed - lareviewofbooks

Gus Casely-Hayford, the V&A Easts first director, discovered art in the most tender of ways. As a young boy on a snowy day, lying beside a radiator, he watched his older brother Joseph as he drew. I had this realisation that you could take a pencil and a pad and you could turn it into something of a whirlwind. Its that sense of both ingenuity and possibility that I fell in love with. Ive spent most of my career pursuing being close to that kind of excellence.

How do you build those genuine and unexpected sparks of inspiration into the infrastructure of a brand new museum? Its a question Casely-Hayford, after spending two years in America as the director of the Smithsonians National Museum of African Art in Washington DC, has returned to the UK to answer. He started his new post last spring leading a project to build and launch two sister sites in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London: a five-storey museum at Stratford waterfront and, 10 minutes walk away, a four-storey collection and research centre at Here East. As V&A East, both will open in 2023 and join BBC Music, Sadlers Wells, University College London, and the UALs College of Fashion as part of East Bank, the mayors 1.1bn creative quarter and Olympic legacy project.

I want V&A East to tell the story of cultural production over the past 5,000 years, with some wonderful shows of some of the great creators, says Casely-Hayford. The new site is part of the V&As development plans that began in 2001 and have seen the launch of a photography centre, the creation of the Exhibition Road Quarter at the original Kensington site, the opening of a new museum in Dundee in 2018 and more. Also under way is the transformation of the V&As Museum of Childhood in the East End. The intention with V&A East is to make the collection more accessible to visitors and more digitally engaged. Just watching the concrete being poured, Casely-Hayford says of visiting the museums construction site recently, you get a sense of this vision coming to life. Its going to be glorious.

Although he enjoyed his tenure at Americas Smithsonian museum, I get the feeling that Casely-Hayford is happy to be back in London, his eyes lighting up over our Zoom call whenever he talks about his home town. Best arts education. Best arts sector. Thats what drew me back here, he says. I know New York. I know LA. Ive visited so many of the great cultural hubs but theres something about London. Theres a particular kind of originality. If you think of the great east London practitioners of recent years, Alexander McQueen and David Bailey, they are people who, in terms of their background and upbringing, had to push against a lot of closed doors. When those doors do open, those are the people that seem to define eras and moments. Britain is catalysed in great part by people who sit on the margins and the fringes.

Casely-Hayford was born in south London in 1964 to a Ghanaian family where talent seems to run in the bloodline. Guss grandfather, Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford, was a journalist, educator and politician notable for his contributions to pan-African theory, who married Adelaide Smith, a writer, activist and pioneer of womens education in Sierra Leone, where she established a school for girls in 1923 during colonial rule.

Guss father, Victor, trained as a barrister but went on to become an accountant, while his uncle, Beattie, was an engineer who was the first director of the Ghana Arts Council and a director of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation. Victor married Ransolina, who worked for the British Council, and they had four children, Gus being the youngest. His sister Margaret, a lawyer, was the first female chancellor of Coventry University. Joseph, the celebrated fashion designer who blended tailoring with streetwear, died in 2019 after being diagnosed with cancer three years earlier. His other brother, Peter, is a film-maker. I felt very blessed and lucky growing up with very talented siblings. I was the youngest so I watched my sister go off to Oxford. My brother did incredibly well at the BBC and my other brother was a designer. It gave a sense that there were boundaries and barriers, but that you keep on going. I will forever feel indebted to them for that.

The theme of boundaries and barriers pops up frequently in our conversation, and though from the outside it may appear that Casely-Hayford, now 57, has risen effortlessly through a career in the arts, he mentions that up until recently, there has been a lot of stumbling from one opportunity to another. Perhaps thats why he is so passionate about access to culture, aware of the obstacles he once faced, and those that exist today. We seem to create emotional and intellectual assault courses that make it hard for new audiences to really engage with the arts, he says. If you think of the museum paradigm, it has barely changed. You go into a space and you look through glass, you read a label and then you leave. If you look at so many other areas of cultural practice, theyve been transformed over the course of the past 20 years by digital engagement, by demands for interactivity.

V&A East presents an exciting opportunity, then, to reimagine the museum for contemporary needs. The five-storey museum, designed by Dublins ODonnell + Tuomey (which also worked on the Photographers Gallery in London and the Lyric theatre in Dublin in 2011), will house two collection galleries, a major exhibition hall, a large-scale installation and events space, and more. That building is based on a Balenciaga dress. Its exquisite, he says. The space itself will be accessible in every possible way. Well build around it digital technologies, so you can both engage with the collection while youre there and leave something of yourself behind, like comments. So it becomes not just a repository of objects, but of peoples thoughts and feelings and dreams.

The neighbouring Collection and Research Centre has been designed by New York-based Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the firm that worked on the expansion of New Yorks Museum of Modern Art. Traditionally, collection centres were places only academics and specialists would go. Youd have to navigate a huge amount of security and bureaucracy. The V&A has more than 100,000 archives, 360,000 library books and 260,000 objects. These will be taken out of storage and put on public view, some for the first time in generations. Well have glass floors and glass balustrades. So rather than pressing your nose against a display case, were going to pick you up and place you in the centre of the collection. Youll be able to look in any direction and see these objects, have hands-on time with pieces, he says, adamant that the display wont feel dusty or dry or inaccessible, but like something that belongs to the public.

Talking to Casely-Hayford, its clear that V&A seeks first and foremost to cater to Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2015. We have this amazing generation who are so culturally engaged. Through digital means, they have created all sorts of really dynamic and thrilling ways to engage with culture. Rather than patronise them and tell them what they ought to be thinking and learning, we want to work with them. A programme of extensive community engagement and collaboration is planned from the outset: the design collective Resolve will be the museums youth workers in residence; a pilot project will also see 15 east Londoners aged 16-24 gaining gallery experience; and local arts organisations such as Create will collaborate on pre-opening events. And if that doesnt work? We want to get out into the communities and take our collection to the people. I had a session with my team in which I said I want to get to every single one of the 500 schools myself within the four boroughs of our site. Ill be on my bicycle, going to schools and community centres, getting them inspired and excited about whats coming, he says. The small amount of encouragement that was given to me as a child, it opened up horizons.

So what will be on show when the V&A East opens its doors? Casely-Hayford tells me they will put on display huge things that have never been seen before, such as a carved and gilded 15th-century wooden ceiling from the Palacio de Altamira in Torrijos in Spain. The office of Edgar J Kaufmann, who worked with Frank Lloyd Wright on Fallingwater, has been brought in its entirety and will be installed in the collection centre, he says. But subtle things too. One of my earliest memories is my aunts bringing pieces of Ghanaian cloth and telling their stories. We will have some of those on display. They seem like modest things but they hold histories and take you on an amazing journey.

Casely-Hayford cites the V&As 2019 Christian Dior exhibition as a success he hopes to replicate (the exhibition dedicated to the fashion house broke the museums attendance records with 594,994 visitors). When you see an exhibition like Dior, how incredibly compelling it is, how beautifully produced it is there is a huge amount of work, research and conservation that goes on behind the scenes. The way the V&A does things is awe-inspiring. I want to deploy all of that, for an audience in a part of London that has been so overlooked and neglected.

Quite a challenge, I suggest, to be at the helm of a museum being built in a historically deprived area, amid the uncertainty of a decade that began with the temporary closure of all of Britains cultural institutions owing to Covid-19 (and now many including the Tate galleries, the Science Museum and the V&A have announced mass redundancy plans). The pandemic has been tough, he says. For us, its extended the timetable for the build and added to the cost. Across the sector, it has brought a range of challenges. It reduced visitor numbers and challenged our financial models.

But its also done something else, he adds. I live quite close to Hampstead Heath and I have watched people, who in lockdown, have been so craving the arts that theyve been doing impromptu concerts and poetry readings. Its underlined the importance of the arts. Even when it comes to Brexit and the effects of Covid on travel, Casely-Hayford sees an opportunity. In Britain, we are going to lose for the next couple of years, our international visitors. It gives us a chance to interact with local audiences. Not just the traditional museum-goers, but all those other people who would never consider it.

Last July, after the killing of George Floyd in America, Casely-Hayford wrote a fiery essay for the Art Newspaper on the issue of racism in the arts. He wrote: If students of African descent squeeze through narrow conduits into university or art school, they will rarely see themselves positively reflected among the faculty or in the curriculum. And if they favour a career in the arts well, good luck.

Its easy to see him as an example of black excellence. Before the Smithsonian job, he was the director of the visual arts organisation Iniva, and before that, in charge of Africa 05, the largest African arts season ever hosted in Britain, involving more than 150 venues. But even with his family background he has had to do the infamous juggle, working multiple part-time jobs across various organisations and disciplines in order to keep his seat at the table.

Race plays a part, he says. I could never have taken the traditional career path beginning at the bottom of an institution and working my way up. I had to have multiple parallel careers because it was just impossible otherwise. My first big full-time job was as a director! he says, referring to his post at Iniva, which he took up in 2006. At V&A East we will employ more than 100 people. I hope the young version of me has the opportunity I never had. If V&A East is successful for one thing, I hope its that.

Casely-Hayford does not want the museum to shy away from the discourse on decolonisation, from the need to redress the art canon and its bias to whiteness, from the looted artefacts that sit in British museums, which often fail to reckon with their pasts or take seriously calls for repatriation. These are some of the critical issues for the ongoing credibility of institutions. How we deal with the heritage of empire and colonisation. How we deal with issues of enslavement. We have to face it. Its not something we can be evasive about. Its about visiting these things and trying to find a way to navigate them and shine a light on passages of history weve tried to obscure. Its about recalibrating, contesting areas and about asking the right questions.

You might recognise Casely-Hayford from the BBC Four series he presented, Lost Kingdoms of Africa, which first aired in 2010. In the show, he explored pre-colonial artworks from places such as Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and the kingdom of Asante. Its this knowledge, this interest, that fuels him. I began my academic career as a specialist in African art. It remains very deep in my curatorial DNA. I also have a residual frustration at how it hasnt had the acknowledgement it deserves. Its the culture with the longest historical narrative and the greatest ethnic diversity and yet we know so little about it. It absolutely infuriates me, he says. I am determined that V&A East will open the world up to new stories and Africa will absolutely be a part of that.

Equally, he wants to celebrate British makers and history. Chris Ofili, Yinka Shonibare, these are the British people that make me feel proud. In film, in photography, in almost every single medium, there are Brits. This is our Olympics. This is the area we win gold in all the time, in the cultural sector, he says. But? We need to invest. We invest in big infrastructure, building bridges and new roads. Culture is an area in which we naturally excel. If we invest, it will transform the opportunities of a generation.

I ask him who his favourite writers are, and he tells me he is a friend of the Booker winning author Bernardine Evaristo. Just watching her move from struggling to being in a position she always deserved has been so heartening, he says. He also adores Aminatta Forna, the Scottish-Sierra Leonean author probably best known for her novel The Memory of Love, which won the Commonwealth writers prize for best book in 2011, and was shortlisted for the Orange prize for fiction. Her genealogical history is very similar to mine. The way she describes what its like to live in a country in which you are native, but also to feel so often excluded or marginalised. That is what the arts can do. Show you what its like to walk the path of someone else.

Computer-generated images of V&A East depict a kind of utopia. A museum surrounded by leafy trees, filled with curious people, sunlight gleaming through floor-to-ceiling windows. Letting go of some pandemic-induced nihilism, I can see the vision. The museum as a place of sanctuary, a centre of the community and art, thinking and education. Our success must be tied to becoming a crucible for catharsis, says Casely-Hayford. I do feel there are some things that can draw people together. Watching sport does it. Seeing truly great art can do it. Thinking back to being a teenager I would have adored a place of refuge and escape and inspiration. A place in which I could see myself reflected.

Me being a minority-ethnic director adds an additional layer of stress and pressure, he says. As frustrated or as upset as I occasionally get, its hard not to be inspired by being given this incredibly precious opportunity to craft this thing that is so timely. So needed. For me, this is the dream job and I want to share that dream with as many people as I can.

V&A East is due to open in 2023

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Meet Gus Casely-Hayford, the man on a mission to drag museums into the 21st century - The Guardian

By Ada Fisher

The recent action taken by the Quaker Oats family of products to change the name of Aunt Jemima to the Pearl Milling Company, which in 1888 developed self-rising flour, was a supposed bid to redress complaints of racism from the perceived belittling name for their pancake mix taking away from its legacy of good home cooking.

The face of Aunt Jemima was originally depicted by Nancy Green, a member of my grandfathers Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago. Green, a woman of class, was not a mammy, per se, but one born into slavery and found to be a servant of Gods word. In a bid for cultural whatever, nihilism is a description for removing all vestige of truth in search of political correctness and by which Black History has been distorted with facts thought to be a disgrace haphazardly removed rather than allow such to exist on its own truth.

Another example of something thats not quite the truth is an interpretation of the 1898 Wilmington Riots in North Carolina as simply race riots. They were a much more damning look at political retribution against the Republican Party. In the elections of that time in the city of Wilmington, though Blacks had claimed the public offices of that powerful port city, lost in the accounting of truth telling was that all of these elected people were registered Republicans.Some were killed. Others were run out of town via trains where Democrats were behind the violence. Too many, whether white or Black, stood quiet to this travesty of justice.

Prior to 1935, the majority of Blacks in elected office and all in national office were Republicans. In order to seize their power, the Democratic Party used tactics of violence. Jim Crow laws, poll taxes and gerrymandering were designed to keep blacks from voting and assuming power. The Ku Klux Klan was at their behest and did their biding. How quickly we forget and are too fast in failing to correctly direct blame from its inception. The attribution of such racism solely to the Republican Party reflects, in part, that many of these Democrats were to later infiltrate the Republican Party trying to nullify its quest for equal rights in their championing of the 13th, 14thand 15thUS Constitutional Amendments.

People are claiming the mantle of Black achievement that really didnt have the intestinal fortitude to start or truly get in the fight. Even today, Colin Kaepernick, a sidelined San Francisco 49ers football player who put it all on the line in taking a knee against racism and injustice during the National Anthem, is a pivotal anchor whose action strengthened the Black Lives Matter movement. For such, he is still out of a job in football.He, as well as others whove stood up for the right against discrimination, is persistently black balled and EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) hasnt done a thing to help.

The Republican imprint on Black history is enormous. Though it is often erroneously denigrated and excluded from appreciation. We are the ones who fought long and hard for the recognition and promotion of Black achievement. Let us not forget that James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosemond wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing in 1906 in honor of Abraham Lincoln. Carter G. Woodson in 1915 founded the organization for the study of Negro life and history followed with Negro History Week in 1926. President Richard M. Nixons 1968 appointee, Arthur A. Fletcher, pioneered the notation of affirmative action during his stint as assistant secretary of the Department of Labor. In 1976, President Gerald R. Ford recognized Black History Month as part of the U.S. Bicentennial. President Ronald Reagan signed into law the Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday in 1983. Most recently of note, it was President George W. Bush who on Sept. 24, 2016 authorized the establishment of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is now a part of the Smithsonian Institute.

Many of the historically Black colleges and universities also benefited from the generosity of Republican leadership in their founding and continued support.

Though the Black church is publicly being acknowledged as central to our history, missed to date in its telling is some understanding of what the nature of the slave songs hidden codes truly were about historically as well as the bonds of brotherhood used to bring on social change and Black revolutions. The prevalence of Black ministers as perceived leaders in the fight for equal rights misses the cloaked interconnectedness in this fight from the Black Masonic and fraternal orders, artisans, educational frameworks, merchants, artists as well as farmers and lay people of color.

On a metaphysical level, Black history is the tying of our souls in existence to the great architect of the universe; it is as if we are the embodiment of quantum entanglement (a cosmic phenomenon occurring when entities generate, interact or share spatial proximity in a manner that the quantum state of each cannot be described independently of the others, including when separated at a distance in time or space).

In dismantling certain historical statues of our nations early founders, trying to erase history to ignore what blinds us in our pain or rewrite it to suit our purposes, we often fail to understand or acknowledge significant contributions to who we were and are.Let us give credit where credit is due. Our history should be a constant reminder and incentive for us to do the right thing.

Salisburys Ada Fisher is a licensed teacher, retired physician, former school board member and former N.C. Republican national committeewoman.

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Ada Fisher: Revisionist Black history leaves things out - Salisbury Post - Salisbury Post

Rage 2 is a pastiche of better shooters that have been released in the past decade, but that aspect of its design hides one huge secret for people looking for hidden gems: The combat and sense of power from the games guns and abilities is almost unmatched in gaming right now. Its the perfect free video game, if youre in the mood for a first-person shooter. Which is great news, because its currently free on the Epic Games Store.

Rage 2s story is a jumbled mess that I wont even try to describe; lets just say you play as a chosen one with special powers and leave it at that. You explore a somewhat open world, finding new weapons, working your way up through the tech tree, and unlocking a series of preternatural abilities while fighting against The Authority. You just know theyre bad with a name like that. The games aesthetic suggests something like splatterpunk, evoking the violent nihilism of the Borderlands series.

The original Rage was a pretty mediocre shooter from id Software, and John Carmack himself later directly apologized for its PC performance. So there wasnt a lot that Avalanche Studios and id Software could pull from it for the sequel. You dont have to worry about knowing the story beats from the first game to enjoy this one; its easily forgotten, and nothing of value is lost.

You may never care why youre doing something in Rage 2, or who exactly youre going after, but the combat itself shines like a beacon. Or at least, it does once you collect some of the better guns and abilities and get them nice and leveled up. The interface doesnt always make this easy, but its worth the hassle.

I can use one ability to fling enemies backward, slamming them into walls or each other, I wrote in our original review. I can use another ability to force enemies to float in the air, pulling other items toward them as if by the gravitational force of a very small black hole. I can turn myself into a human grenade and slam into the ground, reducing everyone around me to a bloody smear. I can upgrade my ability to leap high into the air until I can basically climb up the face of sheer-looking cliffs by spamming the jump button.

This combination of abilities, as well as weapons that all sound and feel brutally powerful in action, makes Rage 2 into a creative playground of violence. How you kill folks is up to you, and you can spend a lot of time in the menus creating a fun loadout to get out there and just straight up wreck shit.

Rage 2 was a hard sell when it launched at $59.99, but for the cost of zero dollars, you should absolutely grab it. Its a game that exists within a generic shell of attitude and faux edginess, and that can be annoying. But it can also be fun to giggle at the common gaming tropes and silly narrative excuses for how your player character became the most powerful fighter out on the battlefield.

Regardless, hidden inside this OK game is one of the best examples of weapon design and selection Ive seen in quite some time. Im always interested in just seeing how my arsenal grows and interacts with the world as I go forth and kill everyone I see in order to do whatever it is Im trying to do. Theres never been a better time to take out all your frustrations on virtual bad guys who are happy to die by the thousands.

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Free game alert: Rage 2 on PC is yours for the taking - Polygon

Evonne in the docuseries Trans In TrumplandPhoto: Topic

Heres whats happening in the world of television for Thursday, February 25. All times are Eastern.

Trans In Trumpland (Topic, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): Trans In Trumpland is a powerful docuseries with a total runtime of under two hours. Filmmaker Tony Zosherafatain takes a road trip across four states in the U.S. that have transphobic lawsNorth Carolina, Texas, Mississippi, and Idahoto converse with four transgender people of different ages and races as they cope with or fight against the anti-trans policies implemented by the Trumps administration. Zosherafatain, who is a trans man himself, gets to tell his own story over the course of four episodes as he meets members of the community to unpack the intersectional issues they face, whether its related to race, immigration, poverty. Trans In Trumpland doesnt just focus on these issues; it also demonstrates how these four people try to overcome them on a daily basis. While certain direction and music choices skew on the dramatic side, the docuseries works because of the compelling subject matter, especially the story of trans Latinx immigrant Rebecca, who moved to the U.S. at the age of 10 with her mother and has been detained by ICE three times. Its a step beyond negative headlines, offering a glimpse into the lived experience of those directly affected by laws such as the discriminatory HB2 bill, which prohibits trans people from using bathrooms and lockers that align with their gender identity, or the trans military ban. Created by TransWave Films with Transparents Trace Lysette as an executive producer, this docuseries is a heartfelt must-watch. [Saloni Gajjar]

Mr. Mayor (NBC, 8 p.m.): season-one finaleClarice(CBS, 10 p.m.)

The Dark And The Wicked (Shudder, 3:01 a.m., streaming premiere): [A] sense of morbid inevitability, of death laughing at humanitys feeble platitudes about the power of love and Gods plan, is at the heart ofThe Strangers writer-director Bryan Bertinos savagely efficient new film The Dark And The Wicked. This film is about vicious nihilism as much as it is about anything, and if a character expresses hope or happiness at any point during its compact 95-minute running time, you can bet that fate is going to make them look like a fool. Even the moralistic message that lurks under the surface of many horror movies is absent here; the evil in this film appears to be Biblical in nature, but faith and virtue are no more effective at stopping it than denying its existence altogether. Read the rest of Katie Rifes film review.

Punky Brewster(Peacock, 3:01 a.m., complete first season): While the newest, most self-aware iteration of Saved By The Bell managed to find the sweet spot between its dated source material and todays comedic palette, the new Punky Brewster simply dons an ill-fitted costume of an aged-up favorite without sincerely growing up, remaining reliant on old catchphrases and adorable spunk without unearthing anything that is truly fresh. And while a little mindless escapism and vaguely comforting warmth cant hurt, it is ultimately a continuation of a story that firmly ended over 30 years ago. Read the rest of Shannon Millers pre-air review, and remember, if you ever feel the urge to play hide and seek, never hide inside an abandoned fridge.

Luda Cant Cook (3:01 a.m., Discovery+, one-hour special): Chris Bridges, better known to hip-hop fans and people who love the Fast & Furious movies as Ludacris, is apparently not much of a cook. Chef Meherwan Irani aims to change that in this Discovery+ special. Wed like to suggest that perhaps Luda should go on to make really excellent side-dishes that feature prominently in other peoples meals. Seems like hed be good at that.

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New docuseries explores what it means to be Trans In Trumpland - The A.V. Club

In a little-known 1947 essay Humanism and Terror, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that a society is not the temple of value-idols that figure on the front of its monuments or in its constitutional scrolls; the value of a society is the value it places upon mans relation to man. He was critiquing what he saw as a grandstanding French liberalism, too infatuated with its ideals to see what was being carried out in its name. To understand and judge a society, he continued, one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly depends upon legal relations, but also upon forms of labour, ways of loving, living, and dying.

Merleau-Ponty was writing at a time of incendiary debate among intellectuals in post-war France. Left-wing philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, finding themselves caught between American-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism, wondered if there was an alternative to either. (Humanism and Terror was in part a response to Arthur Koestlers Darkness at Noon, a novel about the 1930s Stalin show trials.) Friendships were formed and torn apart over discussions on the use of violence in the service of revolution. Merleau-Ponty broke with Sartre and Beauvoir over their continued defence of the Soviet Union.

Then, in 1954, another historical upheaval would quickly reinvigorate the debate on violence, politics, and revolution: the fight for Algerian independence. It caused rifts of its own, notoriously between Sartre, who praised the emancipatory potential of revolutionary violencenotably in his introduction to Frantz Fanons Wretched of the Earth (1961)and Albert Camus. Camus, an Algerian pied noir of European descent, first argued that violence could quickly turn to nihilism in The Rebel (1951); later, he stood up on a podium to a large audience in Algiers during the war, proposing a civilian truce and asking the crowd to renounce the slaughter of innocents. His hesitant attitude to Algerian independence still garners disagreement in Algeria todayas are debates in France on secularism, Islam, and the nations colonial afterlives.

Fiction is one way of squaring Merleau-Pontys paradox between the gap of ideals and lived reality. It can unsettle the dictums of our time and speaks to our contemporary ways of living, loving, and dying that do not make it onto the front pages of newspapers, or into the speeches of politicians. Or, as Fernand Iveton, the protagonist of Joseph Andrass 2016 novel, Tomorrow They Wont Dare to Murder Us, translated by Simon Leser, puts it with reference to French attitudes to Algerian demands for independence: We put them behind bars and abolish their parties, dissolved, reduced to silence, and then we stand so tall with Culture, Liberty, Civilisation, those capital letters, paraded up and down.

Tomorrow blends fiction and non-fiction, picking up where Sartre and Camuss debate on violence and the French state left off. Iveton was a real-life supporter of Algerias National Liberation Front (FLN), born to Spanish and French parents in Algiers in 1926, and was the only European executed by France during the war, at the age of 29. The grand adages of the French republicequality, humanism, and human rightscrumble to dust in Andrass taunt, lyrical telling, as Iveton, a worker at a local gas company, prepares to set off a bomb in an abandoned shed at the factory where he works. He gets caught and is brutally interrogated by the police; his story attracts the attention of the press in Algeria and France. The French public calls for his blood. Meanwhile his wife Hlne, a defiant Polish Jew, becomes a local heroine within the underground Algerian resistance.

***

Andrass style can be frenetic. This is Iveton remembering the making of the bomb: The timer is relentless, liable to drive a person crazy in the most literal way, tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock tick-tock. Then, suddenly, a return to the present:Wheres the bomb you son of a bitch? Fernand is blindfolded with a thick piece of torn cloth. His shirt lies on the floor, shorn of most of its buttons. One of his nostrils is bleeding. A cop punches him as hard as he can; his jaw makes a faint cracking sound. Wheres the bomb?

Ivetons imprisonment and torture is woven alongside an earlier story of his relationship with Hlne. Here, the previously staccato prose becomes joyous, tender, full of soaring possibility that will be violently foreclosed. Iveton meets Hlne at a restaurant in Paris, where she works as a waitress. He notices her eyes, coloured the kind of wolf-dog blue which rummages around your heart, never asking for permission, which enchant the North African kid that he is. She tells him about her family, how her mother cast off her wealthy family to run off with her father, and which of her family members were massacred during the Second World War. They talk about politics: Fernand is upfront about his proletarian sympathies. Hlne laughs: Why not? Communism would be nice, sure, provided that its actually implemented, equality for all, the real thing, without bigwigs or bureaucrats, without propaganda or political commissars. But that doesnt really exist anywhere, not even in the USSR, she points out.

What distinguishes Iveton is his belief that there can be that seemingly impossible space in-between. A member of the Algerian Communist Party, he becomes frustrated with the inertia of the partyitself riven with debate on whether the FLN comprised a genuine revolution or the doing of reckless agitatorssees his friends die in the war, and becomes an independent affiliate of the FLN. He does not agree with some of their methods, choosing instead to place a bomb at an abandoned building near his workplace to mess up some equipment and make a symbolic statementone that could have hardly harmed a large fly. When he later recounts the story to his inmates, a man named Abdelaziz objects, saying that pilots who bomb villages dont care about the children cowering inside of their homesand eye for an eye, he concludes. If this were non-fiction, perhaps wed be taken down the line of the Sartre-Camus debate on the ethics of violence, judge each side and come to a definitive conclusion. Instead, Ivetons trialnow followed intensely by newspapers, politicians, and Hlneawaits.

What is clear, though, is that Iveton will not be granted the same nuance with which he approaches his own politics by a nervous and vengeful French state. He goes into the trial believing that his intentions will absolve himhe did not want to hurt anybody, he tells the court. He only wanted to draw the French governments attention to the growing number of combatants fighting for greater social happiness, he tells the court, and to prove that not all European Algerians are anti-Arab, because the gulf keeps growing. Iveton trusts that France is no dictatorship; itll be able to see whats what, and reports to the judge of his experience being beaten and torturedactions nominally prohibited.

But to the state, Iveton is not so much an individual with a fine-tuned purpose but a European Algerian who crossed an impossible threshold at an impossible time. The French state is on edge, his lawyers tell him; politicians claim in public that Iveton had intended to blow up the whole city; French newspapers deem him a killer. Meanwhile Franois Mitterrand, then senior minister in charge of leading the response for the war, is confirming death sentences, holding the firm position that Algeria is France. Some speculate that because of Ivetons race he will be spared, but things are more complicated. Iveton shows the others that there is a different way to be European. For breaking open these conditions of possibility, he is too dangerous to keep alive.

First published in France in May 2016 under the name Nos frres blesss, Andrass novel was awarded the Prix Goncourt prize for debut novels, sparking public interest in an unknown writer. Andras declined the prize, writing in a letter that competition and rivalry were in his eyes notions foreign to writing and creation. He has avoided engaging with the media, only giving short interviews to a few newspapers in which he reasserted his desire to live privately against the age of spectacle, publicity, and media.

The only things he has to say to the public, he followed, are in his booka book that brings in vivid, roaming detail the life of one man, a historical conflict, and the ignoble past of a nation state at odds with its avowed ideals. The story of Iveton soon became folded into national myth: Sartre memorialised him in an essay titled We Are all Assassins; Camus, too, is said to have tried to prevent Ivetons death, warning that unpunished crimes, according to the Greeks, infected the city-statewhich rings like a premonition to the France of today, tumbling down in the gulf between Culture, Liberty, Civilisation and the violence it exacted throughout history and continues into the present day. Andrass retelling adds to the rich canon. Though in it, Iveton not only becomes a historical symbol, but reanimated as a flesh-and-blood man who loved and was loved back.

Tomorrow They Wont Dare to Murder Us by Joseph Andras, translated by Simon Leser (Verso)

Originally posted here:

What fiction reveals about the Algerian War - Prospect Magazine

Shades of nihilism are no stranger to the horror genre. The human body is so often manipulated and destroyed in the face of an evil force. However, in the 21st century, a new type of nihilistic cinema was born in France with the New French Extremity. After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the world felt defenseless, and the films within this movement, such as Martyrs and High Tension, depend on the complete destruction of the human body to convey a sense of hopelessness: bad things happen to normal people and it cannot be stopped. But in the US, while there was a rise in torture porn films such as Saw and Hostel, there wasnt such a pervading sense of nihilism in mainstream American horror cinema.

Enter Bryan Bertino, who burst into the film world in 2008 with his home invasion thriller, The Strangers. With his killers reasoning simply being because you were home, Bertino established himself as a filmmaker who was not interested in happy endings. Instead, his work encapsulates the deep sense of insecurity that came with post-9/11 America and pervades today. His entire filmography speaks to the futility of humanity trying to gain control over danger and how sometimes terrible things just happen to good people. There is no rhyme or reason as to why Bertinos characters are targeted. Their horrific fate is nothing but random chance.

The shock of The Strangers during its initial release was particularly centered on that key phrase: Because you were home. Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) are staying at his family cottage in the middle of nowhere. As they settle in for the night, they receive loud knocks at the door from a young woman who asks, Is Tamara home? This unsettling interaction launches a series of events where three people in masks terrorize the couple for no other reason except for their sick enjoyment. They have no history with Kristen and James and just so happened to choose the house because the couple opened the door. Common courtesy is weaponized as an invitation to kill.

Kristen and James are barely able to inflict injury on the masked assailants. Even when they find a gun or grab a knife, they are unable to ever gain the upper hand against the three strangers. These are not bumbling criminals, but sociopaths who do this for the thrill of the hunt. They know what to expect from a desperate couple trying to save themselves, and they toy with them all night as a sick game. The only goal is pain they dont want money or revenge. They just want blood.

This invasion of the domestic space has a close correlation to post-9/11 cinema, as genre film even more explicitly established homes as a place of danger rather than safety. While home invasion was not a new topic, in the 2000s, homes were most often invaded by random strangers rather than monsters or bloodthirsty serial killers. The monsters are the humans themselves, capable of horrific violence.

Released in 2014, Mockingbird is Bryan Bertinos venture into the found footage subgenre, which is arguably a nihilistic genre in general. A majority of films with that label contain raw footage of a person or groups final days and therefore end with the death of everyone on camera. But Mockingbird goes the extra mile in having unnamed people, similar to The Strangers, torture three separate groups of people who are eventually brought together in an act of extreme violence. They place mysterious boxes on front doorsteps, each containing a video camera and a set of instructions. If they dont follow instructions, they or someone they love will be killed.

Each group has a special label that makes them a figure instead of people: The Family, couple Tom and Emmy; The Woman, Beth; and The Clown, Leonard. Their humanity is removed and they are stripped of any illusion of agency; they become puppets for the sick enjoyment of whoever may be watching. Again, similar to The Strangers, the three groups of victims are never in control of the situation despite hiding in their homes with the doors and windows locked. Home means nothing when an assailant can predict every move.

But the most nihilistic element of Mockingbird is the reveal of who has always been in control of the situation: a group of children. Creepy, possessed children are a horror staple, but here, they are not possessed nor under the influence of an evil entity. Instead, it is implied, they are acting of their own volition and torturing adults as a sick game. Once again, human life is tossed around like a plaything, showing there is nothing left but the infliction of suffering.

Bryan Bertinos third film, The Monster, released in 2016, is perhaps the biggest deviation from his typical films, incorporating an actual monster instead of just cruel humans. The threat feels much further from reality as the creature is attacking a mother (Zoe Kazan) and daughter (Ella Ballentine after theyve broken down on a back road. The Monster more closely follows genre conventions in its setup and use of a fictional monster to create fear.

That is not to say that Bertino does not sprinkle in his love of misery, which is centered on the tumultuous relationship between a mother and her young daughter, who is painfully aware of her mothers alcoholism. As the two try to navigate each others emotions, they are pummeled by this creature, which doesnt care about their issues. They scream insults at one another, and neither mother nor daughter is safe from violence. Ultimately, Bertino continues to portray the death of the family not just by their resentment, but also by the mothers eventual death. Yes, she protected her child, but that still leads to a message of families unable to truly stay together in the face of violence.

Bertinos most recent film, 2020s The Dark and the Wicked, is the culmination of his previous three films in how families become random targets of violence with no rhyme or reason. Again, the family, the domestic unit that is supposed to be the backbone of America and a safe place shielded from the horrors of the world, is systematically destroyed. No longer is the home safe; the place that was once a shelter becomes a hellscape.

When they receive news that their father is dying, siblings Louise (Marin Ireland) and Michael (Michael Abbott, Jr.) return home to the family farm despite their mothers aggressive insistence that they dont come. Her vague words of warning wont stop her children, and upon their arrival, whatever is plaguing the farm extends its influence to Louise and Michael. It is an insidious force with only the goal to cause pain, and pain it brings as the entire family is haunted by horrific images that blur the lines between reality and delusion.

No matter what Louise and Michael do to try to stop the entity haunting their family, they are stopped in their tracks. In fact, the presence plaguing every second of their lives tells the siblings that their father did nothing wrong. They were just chosen at random. Just as in The Strangers, Mockingbird, and The Monster, these events dont necessarily have a catalyst. They were just the unlucky ones that gained the attention of a bored entity that wants to wreak havoc.

Their fathers nurse commits suicide via a knitting needle through the eye. Their mother chops off her fingers and hangs herself in the barn. There is no absolution of sins or purification that can save them. The story is an inversion of the typical possession plot where a family can band together and conquer the evil together as one unified front. Instead of the eventual happy ending and banishing of the demon, each family member slowly succumbs to their doomed fate.

Suffice to say, Bertinos filmography is universally bleak as he aims to navigate nihilism and the random nature of violence rather than creating mythical beings with elaborate backstories. In avoiding the characterization of his villains, they become all the more terrifying as they become looming and unknowable figures who enjoy nothing more than suffering.

In looking at how 21st-century cultural insecurities have been filtered through a genre lens, the work of Bryan Bertino should be at the top of the list as films that refuse to sugarcoat reality and instead lean into our deep sadness about the destruction of an illusion of safety.

Original post:

Bryan Bertino and 21st-Century Nihilism - Film School Rejects

A government that wanted to protect people could have prevented whats happening right now in Texas.

Because of the winter storm freezing the state, basically every large source of energy in Texas is down or barely functioning, and rolling blackouts have been announced.

Predictably, the blackouts have not actually been rolling. Instead, they have been heavily weighted towards poorer areas and diverted away from richer, whiter areas. This could be seen coming from a mile away, since it happens every time a widespread disaster occurs. For its part, ERCOT, the nonprofit council that controls power in Texas, dodged questions about why blackouts were longer term and not rolling, simply saying that doing so prevented bigger problems, without elaborating.

This is a pattern. Time and time again, resources are shifted away from marginalized communities and towards the rich and the white. While SARS-CoV-2 does not discriminate in who it infects, the lions share of injuries and deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic have come at the expense of Black people and the poor. Climate change is affecting the entire planet, except its causes come from the wealthy, who can just flee to a mansion on higher ground when the waves inevitably roll in.

The results of the governments action are an admission. I cant read hearts or minds, but if a group of people wanted to protect, say, an energy sectors profit margin above all else, they could skip over needed infrastructure upgrades to save money. When, inevitably, a disaster struck, they would probably protect the wealthy and powerful, those who had the ability to change things, affect state politics, or make a lot of noise. They might even fall back on nonsense excuses for their failures that simultaneously attempt to stoke culture wars, the kind that have gotten many Republicans elected in the first place.

80% of the power used in Texas comes from natural gas. After the last time a winter storm came through, in 2011, Texas had the opportunity to winterize its energy infrastructure. Power companies operating in a deregulated state market simply declined. Since Texas has its own power grid, separate from the rest of the country, there was no one to answer to. Inevitably, another storm came, froze Texass natural gas production, and that was that. Prominent Texas politicians then tried to blame statewide blackouts on the 10% of the states power that comes from green energy sources like wind, an explanation that fails both smell and sight tests.

Now, Texas grocery stores are empty, people have gone days without heat or running water in freezing temperatures, and at least 30 people have died, with that number expected to grow in the coming days.

Another winter storm like 2011 was bound to come one of climate changes many effects is the disruption of the polar vortex, a swirl of cold air thats normally restricted to the Arctic. It may seem contradictory, but warming temperatures globally actually disrupt the polar vortexs normal pattern, sending it south, meaning that Canada and the continental United States will feel it more often and more intensely than they otherwise would. Theres nothing freak about this anymore, and doing nothing in 2011 was a dereliction of governance amounting to a humans rights violation.

Electric grids that answer to no one, by the way, are also contributing to Californias reoccurring wildfire catastrophes. Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) simply prioritizes profits over updating its infrastructure, providing service to people, and protecting against climate change.

So of course this disaster happened. The Texas government simply didnt care to do anything about it. It wont be the last time climate change and profit margins butt up against human rights. Texas will freeze again. Gulf states will continue getting slammed multiple times per year by once-in-a-century hurricanes. Those storms will start creeping up the Eastern seaboard more and more often. California is going to continue burning to the ground year after year. Big Ones are just Normal Ones now.

Maybe the most frustrating part is that the solutions for many of these things are huge endeavors, but none of them are complex or hard to understand. Were past the point of climate denialism. Were in climate nihilism now, where climate change is so big, so obvious, so glaringly killing people today, right now, that government policy in places like Texas is a denial of the principles people in the 21st century need to live well into the 22nd.

Every government action is an admission. That every time the white and the wealthy are shielded from the worst of every climate change-induced catastrophe is an admission. Inaction is an admission from the government of Texas and the US government at large: poor, Black, and marginalized people are not worth protecting. The final admission, the thought that governs: if they die, so what?

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What's happening in Texas is climate nihilism Read now - Massive Science

"Its so funny and sharp. I especially appreciate all the vagina humour."

ABCs new series, Why Are You Like Thisfollows three Aussie besties bumbling with abandon through the crazy freedoms and responsibilities that are your early 20s.

Making up the series central trio is Mia, Penny and Austin. Mia is a south Asian bisexual woman with no desire to keep any job for long. Penny, Mias best friend, is white, riddled with anxiety and determined to prove herself the best friend and ally to everyone she meets. Completing the trio isAustin, Pennys housemate, and budding drag queen struggling with depression.

Across 6, 20-minute episodes, the series unfolds as a sitcom about these three against the world. More specifically, Mia, Penny and Austin againstthe divisive sociopolitical hellscape that is 2021, and its immensely fun.

With unabashedly upfront storylines from lost diva cups to lost jobs theres an optimistic nihilism to Why Are You Like This.Where most series about precarious 20-30-somethings feel concerned with how to justify themselves, the trio inWhy Are You Like Thisare refreshingly unconcerned with agonising over their own existence for validation.

Instead, they opt for relentless frankness that is as confronting as it is entertaining. During episode 3, scenes of Austin scrolling through memes about suicide are intercut with Penny drunkenly bonding with a random girl she met in the bathroom over her Venn diagram of friendship, while Mia fails at getting laid. Its a discomforting sequence held together brilliantly by the creators determination to present experiences as they simply are for so many young people.

No doubt the series addictively honest qualities is a credit to the creators. Comedian, Naomi Higgins (who also plays Penny), and writer, Humyara Mahbub wanted to make a show about their friendship. The pair then teamed upwith Aunty Donnas Mark Bonanno via ABCs comedy Fresh Blood initiative in 2018 and made the pilot.

As a long time addict of the 20-30 somethings figuring life out genre, the seriesfeels like an instant classic. The series follows in the more diverse and nuanced footsteps of series like Insecure, Chewing Gum,or Search Partybut with a distinctively late-millennial/Gen Z edge.

Why Are You Like Thisis currently streaming on ABC iview, and will be internationally released on Netflix later this year.

Merryana Salem is a proud Wonnarua and LebaneseAustralian writer, critic, teacher, researcher and podcaster on most social media as@akajustmerry. If you want, check out her podcast,GayV Clubwhere she gushes about LGBT rep in media with her best friend. Either way, she hopes you ate something nice today.

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'Why Are You Like This' Perfectly Captures The Nihilism Of Your Early 20s - Junkee

Serving veterans as executive director at Huts For Vets has taught me two key things. First: strive to be nonjudgmental. Second: offer love as a healing balm. Neither one is easy because, by nature, were prone to judgments, and love is an abstract, if many-splendored, thing.

Veterans of the war in Vietnam were horribly judged. They were hated and spit upon. Their healing was not allowed because there was no love. Since that war, more than three times the names on the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington have taken their own lives.

Today, the veteran suicide rate hovers around 22 per day. Isolation, despair and moral injury attribute to that grossly high number, a mournful metric that is not only a national crisis but a national scandal.

For the men and women veterans who have served in Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, many suffer moral injury from violations to their deepest selves. Part of our role at Huts For Vets is to enable them talk with other veterans and realize they are not alone. Atonement comes from acceptance and forgiveness.

Our world needs healing. Such an understatement stands out by the acquittal last week of the sociopath who took America to the dark side. Those who voted for acquittal stand on the brink of nihilism, where nothing is sacred.

Such depths of national cynicism incite the hate-filled message of a death threat T-shirt: Rope Tree Journalistsome assembly required. Such gallows humor, if you will, is apparently amusing to psychopaths enabled by the sociopath who cheered on the mob to act out his willful insurrection Jan. 6.

Encouraging hate and violence should be repugnant to anyone with human decency. And remember, death threat targets can be changed by just filling in the blank.

Have we back-stepped so far into the Dark Ages that murderous intent can be so visibly displayed? Im feeling this acutely because Im a journalist. I am the target of a hate group that would incite lynchings. Their hatred has targeted me.

Until you are in the crosshairs, threats seem removed and impersonal. For many veterans, being in the crosshairs was an occupational risk from which they now seek reentry into a society that doesnt know how to value the risks they shared.

Society fails them and the rest of us by perpetuating a debased culture that glorifies violence as popular entertainment. Here lies stark evidence of moral failure in education, religion, family and commercial media.

A Hebrew phrase, Tikkun olam, offers a vital shift with a directive to heal the world, to become an agent of change. Each of us must bear responsibility, not only for our own moral, spiritual and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society.

A modern understanding of tikkun olam explains that we share a partnership with God and are instructed to take steps toward improving the state of the world by helping others. This brings more honor to Gods sovereignty by affirming human dignity.

Im not usually prone to religiosity, but something of the divine must intervene when nihilism threatens common decency and the sacred respect for life. Laws and policies have their place, but the moral heart in each of us must ultimately steer the course of society with spiritual guidance.

Tikkun olam is an aspiration to behave and act constructively and beneficially, to work charitably and altruistically. A higher, nobler purpose is necessary to dissipate the hate and animosity that leads to printing death-threat T-shirts.

Fixing the world must become a socially embraced goal, a way of life for each of us. It begins with attention to every interaction, every word spoken, every gesture made, every thought contemplated. It begins with awareness of how we can improve ourselves and improve the whole.

These are fine, high-sounding words that my fingers spill out rapid fire over the keyboard. Taking them seriously requires sitting back, pondering, assessing, taking honest accounts of ourselves and modeling positive behaviors and attitudes.

Tikkun olam means reinventing ourselves with constructive building blocks. Only then can our individual contributions aggregate into a whole that might truly fix the world.

Paul Andersens column appears on Mondays. He may be reached at: andersen@rof.net

Continued here:

Paul Andersen: What the world needs now is tikkun olam - Aspen Times